Good Morning Afghanistan, the country's first breakfast radio show, made its debut yesterday using equipment from Denmark and jingles borrowed from a Scottish station.
The informal one-hour program of news, probing interviews and feature packages breaks the mould of conventional Afghan broadcasting, which traditionally centers on government propaganda and Islamic teachings.
Broadcast in Dari and Pashto, Afghanistan's two main languages, the show reached a potential audience 22 million Afghans, more than 80 percent of the country's population.
"We don't know if they all listened, but the big achievement is that we went on air," said Charles Fletcher from the Danish non-governmental organization Baltic Media Center, which helped get the program off the ground.
"The team is incredibly enthusiastic. They would have stayed here all night working on the program if they hadn't had to get home before the curfew."
Good Morning Afghanistan hit the airwaves at 6:30am with the mellifluous theme tune of Radio Tay, a local radio station in the Scottish city of Dundee.
Its four presenters, two male and two female, have worked together for just a week.
"The last program I worked on was just for the government, the government controlled everything," said 25-year-old Farida Hillah, who lost her job as a radio presenter in 1996 when the Taliban came to power and banned women from the workplace. "Now we can invite people here to talk about whatever they want. We're giving people back their freedom."
The European Commission has awarded a grant in the amount of 240,000 euros (US$210,000) to pay for the first four months of broadcasting from an abandoned studio in the center of the capital Kabul.
Conditions are not ideal -- there is no water, power supplies are intermittent and a thick layer of dust still sits on the floor and tables.
Six tonnes of outdated equipment have been donated by Radio Tay and Danish state radio, which arrived on a UN flight just two days before the show's launch.
Funds have been channelled through the Baltic Media Center, set up in the early 1990s to help promote democracy in the former Soviet Baltic republics.
The organization later set up "post-conflict" radio stations to aid the process of reconciliation in the Balkans.
"We want Good Morning Afghanistan to be a questioning, probing and relaxed programme in the true Western sense," said Waseem Mahmood of the Baltic Media Center, standing under the show's sunrise logo.
"It's important that we're completely impartial and represent all the different factions and ethnic groups in the country."
The broadcasters say the concept has been warmly welcomed by Afghanistan's interim administration, led by Hamid Karzai.
"We've encountered an openness greater than anywhere we've ever worked," said Mahmood. "If we can show politicians there's nothing to be afraid of in a free, independent media, then we can create a real public service broadcaster, not just a state broadcaster."
Some of the Good Morning Afghanistan team worked for the Taliban's own Radio Sharia, a hardline propaganda machine dominated by Islamic teachings and prayers.
"We had to work because we needed to support our families," said 28-year-old program editor Saffullah Aminzada.
"But we suffered very much. We had no freedom to write our own reports, or suggest our own stories. If we did we'd been thrown straight in jail."
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